State Highway 35, the road connecting Gisborne to Te Araroa and on to Ōpōtiki, was a goat track with narrow, unsealed cuts twisting through hillsides and valleys. That left the wharves at Tolaga and Tokomaru bays as the region’s most reliable access points.
In 2023, more than a century after settlers cut a track inland through the Waioeka Gorge to connect Ōpōtiki to Gisborne, and then with the manpower of local iwi cut a track around the coast itself from Gisborne to Ōpōtiki, SH35 is (in parts) a goat track again. Cyclone Gabrielle washed out hillsides and bridges leaving Tolaga Bay, Tokomaru Bay and other parts of the coast accessible only via air.
In 2023 that’s unacceptable, and partly a consequence of decades of underinvestment in SH35. Successive governments are guilty of various omissions in failing to develop and maintain the highway for maximum resilience.
Of course, those governments might defend their records and argue, as forestry slash crashed down mountainsides, demolishing bridges and river mouths alike, that no amount of development or maintenance could prevent an unstoppable force. Water is the most violent force on Earth, capable of carving out rock and lifting thousands of tonnes of slash.
Yet that defence ignores how successive government policies—various “commissions”—are responsible for the coast’s unstable hillsides, its slash, and its poorly maintained roads.
In the postwar period sheep and dairy farming powered a prosperous regional economy. In the early 1900s Sir Āpirana Ngata took over the management of several local sheep stations, applying European farming methods to the newly cleared hillsides.
Under Ngata’s skilful management the farms were banking handsome profits and, after a series of land reforms amalgamating Māori freehold titles, those profits were distributed across families and communities on the coast.
In the 1920s Ngata’s management model and amalgamation policies were extended to dairy farming, opening new opportunities for export and profit. For much of the 20th century the coast’s economy was more or less a mirror of the New Zealand economy: agriculturalist.
Until it wasn’t. In 1966–67 the price of wool went into decline. For the sheep lords on the coast that meant with every decrease in the price of wool a corresponding increase in the price of competing would occur. Sheep and dairy farms were facing higher costs than their competitors in better-connected regions.
In Hawke’s Bay, good road and rail connections to the Port of Napier meant the cost of exporting was (comparatively) low. But for coasters the cost of freight on the SH35 goat track, or the cost of coastal shipping from Tolaga or Tokomaru was prohibitively expensive.
The oil shocks of the 1970s made freight and shipping more expensive still. In the following decades a good deal of formerly agricultural land was converted to pine plantations.
In hindsight, both decisions seem outrageous. First, clearing virgin forests to make way for sheep stations and dairy farms in the early 20th century, destabilising vast tracts of land, and second, converting those farms and unstable land to pine plantations on a cycle of clear-felling in the latter part of the century.
But both decisions were a consequence of government policies, rather than the negligence or ignorance of the owners. Poor to non-existent infrastructure made sheep farming in a low-price environment increasingly unviable.
At the same time, difficulties in accessing finance for redevelopment meant Māori landowners could no longer access the loans or equity needed to maintain capital-intensive activities. For much of the 20th century state loans underpinned capital development on the coast, but as the neoliberal reformers restructured the state in the 1980s, abolishing the old Department of Māori Affairs and its economic development programmes, Māori landowners were forced to turn to private finance.
The trouble was, again, government policies. Provisions in the Māori Land Act mean private financiers are often cautious in lending against Māori freehold land. Although the act exempts mortgagee sales from the protections against alienation—in other words, if Māori landowners default the lender can sell the land in a mortgagee sale—the land still retains its status as Māori freehold land.
This means the land is governed under the administrative and legislative requirements of the Māori Land Act, even after a mortgagee sale. This dramatically reduces the land’s attractiveness—and thus its price—on the open market. Without access to either private or public finance, then, Māori landowners, like those on the coast, are left with few options other than passive investments in pine.
The fallout on the coast from Cyclone Gabrielle is a century in the making. Without proper government investment in the region, from infrastructure to finance, future economic and physical disasters seem inevitable.
This article was originally published by Stuff Ltd.
Morgan Godfrey is a senior lecturer at Te Kauhanganui Tātai Ture—Faculty of Law, at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.